Fourteen-month-old infants are unable to link minimal pair nonsense words with novel objects (Stager & Werker, 1997). Might an adult's productions in a word learning context support minimal pair word-object association in these infants? We recorded a mother interacting with her 24-month-old son, and with her 5-month-old son, producing nonsense…

The present study investigated the feasibility of applying the Silent Way in teaching Japanese to Taiwanese university students. A total of 168 (96 female and 72 male) students in a university in central Taiwan were the subjects of this study. They were studying Japanese as a general course, and were grouped in five classes ranging from freshmen…

Rejection by peers has devastating effects on children's social-cognitive development. As language difficulties have been found to be one of the underlying causes of peer rejection, the present study focused on the relation between these two variables. Specifically, this study was the first to test a hypothesized model connecting children's level…

This study investigated the feasibility of a teacher implemented intervention to accelerate phonological awareness, letter, and vocabulary knowledge in 141 children (mean age 5 years, 4 months) who entered school with lower levels of oral language ability. The children attended schools in low socioeconomic communities where additional stress was…

There remains considerable disagreement about which factors drive second language (L2) ultimate attainment. Age of onset (AO) appears to be a robust factor, lending support to theories of maturational constraints on L2 acquisition. The present study is an investigation of factors that influence grammatical and lexical complexity at the stage of L2…

The present study is a quantitative research that attempts to scrutinize the place of students' views on integrating contextual micro-grammar revision with contextual vocabulary teaching consistent with Constructivism. Therefore, the study investigates the first and the second-year students' attitudes towards a new technique that attempts to…

The authors examined the impact of 2 subsequent, longitudinal interdisciplinary interventions for 58 Hispanic English language learners (ELLs): (a) Grade 5 science with English language/reading embedded (i.e., science intervention) and (b) K-3 English language/reading with science embedded (i.e., language/reading intervention). Results revealed…

Considering the significant role of vocabulary in learning a language, and teachers' great responsibility in providing opportunities to facilitate this learning, many studies have focused on the best means of achieving a good knowledge of vocabulary. This study set out to investigate the effect of four post-teaching activities, namely game,…

Attitudes toward a foreign language and the motivation to learn a language have been of interest to many educators and researchers. However, the majority of research has been conducted with language learners. There is a lack of literature concerning the attitudes of teachers and teacher trainees toward the language they are or will be teaching.…

Parents of 592 children between the age of 0 ; 8 and 1 ; 4 completed the Estonian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (ECDI Infant Form). The relationships between comprehension and production of different categories of words and gestures were examined. According to the results of regression modelling the…

This study employed Bachman and Palmer's (2010) Assessment Use Argument framework to investigate to what extent the use of a second language oral test as an exit test in a Hong Kong university can be justified. It also aimed to help test developers of this oral test identify the most critical areas in the current test design that might need…

This longitudinal study investigated 196 Hispanic English learners' responses to an English instructional intervention from kindergarten to second grade. The effect of student gender was also examined as a secondary focus. The intervention consisted of ongoing professional development and structured and systematic English intervention during an…

In this study, we examined the influence of child gender and sociocultural (SCL) factors in language production. Subjects were French Parisian children in nine age groups (24, 27, 30, 33, 36, 39, 42, 45 and 48 months). A total of 316 language samples were recorded during a 20-min standardized play session. Measures of grammatical and lexical…

This paper focuses on the aspects of the lexicon in 66 prematurely born very-low-birth-weight and 87 full-term Finnish children at 2;0, studied using the Finnish version of the "MacArthur Communicative Developmental Inventory". The groups did not differ in vocabulary size. Furthermore, the female advantage in vocabulary size was not seen…